Some important facts about the North America Continent? part-1

  1. North America is the third largest continent in world, ranking just below Asia and Africa (which are the first and second largest continents, respectively).
  2. North America covers an area of 24.71 million square kilometers or 9.54 million square miles. This means that 16.5% of the Earth’s total land area is taken up by North America alone.
  3. Despite being the third largest continent in the world, North America only ranks fourth when it comes to population. It is outranked by Europe which has a population of 739 million (North American only has 461 million).
  4. The word “America” comes from the name of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. He is the first person to have realized that the West Indies and Brazil are actually not connected to Asia (as what most people have conjectured from the voyages of Columbus), but are part of another separate landmass of their own.
  5. The name “America” used to refer to only South America alone. However, when the land mass of present North America were added to maps, most mapmakers opted to retain the original name.
  6. North America is contained entirely within the Northern and Western Hemispheres.
  7. Gerard Mercator, a geographer, was the first documented mapmaker who chose to name both the north and south parts of the American landmass as “America” in 1539.
  8. North and South America are usually considered as subcontinents, while America is the larger continent of which these two are part of.
  9. The most dominant languages in North America are Spanish, French, and English. There are also a large number of people who speak Danish, but they are mostly confined to Greenland.
  10. With an area of almost 10 million square kilometers, Canada is the largest country in North America. It is followed by the United States (9.9 million square kilometers), Greenland (2.2. million square kilometers) and Mexico (2 million square kilometers).
  11. North America is bordered by three of the world’s largest oceans, namely the Atlantic , Arctic, and Pacific.
  12. Based on mitochondrial evidence, scientists have concluded that all Native Americans come from a single population group that lived during the time of the last ice age. This population then boomed for the next thousand of years and is then conjectured to have spread quickly throughout the Americas via the Pacific Coast route.
  13. The first Native Americans are believed to have migrated from Asia through a land bridge that once connected the two continents more than 15,000 years ago.
  14. Two of the world’s largest tectonic plates are in North America. They collide frequently along California and Alaska, which usually causes violent earthquakes in the area.
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